


all this time (how could you not notice?)

by impulserun



Category: X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Crack, Fluff, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-11
Updated: 2014-07-11
Packaged: 2018-02-08 10:20:35
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,732
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1937202
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/impulserun/pseuds/impulserun
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Alex Summers is literally the guy in the You Belong With Me music video. And he haaaates it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	all this time (how could you not notice?)

There are four things you should probably know about Alex Summers:

  1.        He's gay. (Or bi. He might be bi. He's definitely not straight, though.)
  2.        He can shoot lasers from his chest.
  3.        He's the guy in the You Belong With Me music video.
  4.        If you ever bring up 3, he will make sure you are personally acquainted with a certain talent he possesses afore mentioned in 2.



*

In his defence, it had been a dark time in his life. His foster parents had discovered his mutation and turned him out of house and home. His younger brother Scott lived halfway across the country. He could no longer afford to pay for high school, let alone potential tuition fees. And just two days ago, he had almost – accidentally! – incinerated some poor kid's puppy. And that was terrible.

So when the frazzled lady in the pencil skirt had approached him at the mall asking if he wanted to make a quick buck, he figured, why the hell not?

The original guy up for the role (Luke or Lucian or something) had caught pneumonia and was stuck in hospital hacking up his lungs, and it was too late to open another casting call (if that even was how these things worked) so apparently they'd resorted to grabbing any random fella off the street. Not that he was complaining. Money was money, after all.

Taylor Swift was kind of nice, he guessed. And he didn't even have to do much in the way of acting. Still, when all was said and done, Alex was glad when filming ended. Though, he had been a little worried about being recognised.

Then, after that, he'd accidentally blown up a back alley and disintegrated a gangster in self-defence, and that god-awful music video was the least of his concerns.

*

“Come _on_ Havok, we’re having a karaoke party. Junior teachers only!” Sean leant down to pull him into a one-armed hug. “The kids are all off for winter, man, you can stand to loosen up a little.”

Alex shrugged off the arm slung around his shoulders without looking up from the paper he was grading. Had McKinnon even _read_ the source material on the Cuban Missile Crisis? This sounded like something out of a movie.  “You sure it’s safe for my ears to have Banshee anywhere near a microphone?”

This was, of course, referring not to his sonic scream mutation, but his tone-deaf singing voice.

“You _wound_ me, Summers. Cut me right to the heart, you did.” The redhead feigned a sob, dramatically placing a hand over his heart and wiping at non-existent tears with the other. Alex rolled his eyes.

“I just want to finish grading this stack of papers, Sean. Then I can move on to grading that _other_ stack of papers –” he gestured to the pile of essays looming ominously at the edge of the table – “and then I can get myself drunk to forget the pain of having ever set eyes on Sillerton’s poor mockery of a discursive essay.”  

“Come on, Alex, it’s only for one night,” he wheedled. “Darwin will be there.”

Alex paused. Looked over at the cubicle across the aisle. Then he looked back at Sean.

The literature teacher grinned triumphantly.

*

The room that they’d been put in at the karaoke parlour was a tight fit for the six of them, but they had gone through so much shit together during their time at the Xavier-Lehnsherr Institute that the tight quarters were hardly an issue at all. (He still had not-so-fond memories of the time they’d all convened to the labs to watch one of Hank’s experiments. They’d ended up trapped in there for three hours waiting for the two headmasters to leave the adjacent room. If, at that point, Alex had still had any innocence left, that was probably when he’d lost it all. Nothing like utter mortification to cement a good friendship.)  

Still, it would have been nice to not have been squished up next to subject of his dreams, waking or otherwise.

“Hey,” said Darwin with an easy grin. “Glad you could make it.”

“Yeah, well, Sean can be fucking persuasive when he wants to be,” he grumbled in response.

“Still, it’s good to see you. Our cubicles are right next to each other but it feels like we haven’t seen each other in ages, y’know?” He slung an arm around Alex’s shoulders, that grin still on his face; Alex fought down the urge to blush.

“Yeah, well, that’s what I get for teaching both History and Mutant Studies. Half the time, I don’t think my classes even listen to me. Their essays sure say otherwise.”

“With you up front teaching the class, I’d be surprised if they _could_ focus.” Alex bristled, a comeback ready on his tongue, but then Darwin’s gaze raked appreciatively up and down his body and wait what was he checking him out?

At that moment, Alex was saved from having to reply by a loud shriek from Angel. “Get Sean away from the microphone! I call dibs on the first song!”

(For a moment, he was glad for the dim lighting of the room, but then he recalled the nature of Armando’s mutation. Well, fuck.)

*

The night was shaping up to be a pretty okay one, even if he wasn’t quite sure what all the flirting – was he really flirting with him holy crap – was all about. Anyway, it meant that he got to spend time catching up with the other ex-trainees. This ranged from listening to Sean wail about lazy students – “They don’t even read the book, man! I swear to god, The Chrysalids isn’t even that long a book!” – to commiserating the loss of one of Hank’s experiments after an accident with Eddie Bacchus (a pyrokinetic). Between songs, Raven would pitch in with an anecdote about situations in the Danger Room – “I’m telling you now, you don’t mess with Elysia Wan if you don’t want an angry reality warper on your case. The things I have seen, Hank. The fights I have had to break up. My eyes will never be the same.” – and Angel would snort and supplement any details that her colleague left out.

“Armando,” said Raven (she was in her blonde guise today, seeing as they were in public), as time marched on, “quit monopolising Alex. He hasn’t touched the mic the entire time he’s been here.”

“I don’t mind,” Alex started, and he had just plucked up the courage to say “He can monopolise me all he wants,” when the opening refrains of the next song picked up and his heart stopped.

Oh no.

Oh _fuck_ no.

“Alex,” said Angel, into the ensuing stunned silence. “Is that – is that you?”

He wondered if he would have turned invisible if he had Darwin’s mutation.

“Oh my god,” said Sean gleefully, as the mini-him on screen held up a sketch-pad, “it _is_.”

He sat frozen in his seat, eyes glued to the screen in abject horror, and – oh mother of god, he was kissing Evil-Taylor now, no, god, make it stop.

“Oh my god, _look_ , it’s ickle baby Alex Summers, oh my _god_.” At this point, Sean had begun to wheeze with laughter.

Alex wanted very much for the ground to open up under his feet, swallow him, and spit him up on the other side of the planet, preferably where no one knew him or of this songs existence. But if there was one thing he had learnt from life, it was that he never got what he wanted.

The other was that the heat curling in the pit of his belly and the tingling at the tips of his fingers meant trouble.

“I’m just,” he hadn’t realised he was standing, he was starting to kind of miss the warmth of Darwin being pressed into his side, “I’m going to – I –”

Okay, you know what, there was no coming back from this, so Alex headed for the door and fled.

*

The next week was hell.

“So,” Sean would ask. “How many times did you and T Swift kiss exactly?”

“Shut up, Sean,” he would grit out. (The answer was at least a hundred, but he was not going to let Sean Shithead Cassidy have the pleasure of knowing that.)

“Wow, you were that bad, huh?” would come the reply, and by the time he had turned around to find sufficient ammunition, the asshole literature teacher would have already escaped down the corridor to his own desk, cackling all the way.

Angel was considerably more sympathetic, which was surprisingly nice of her, but Raven would occasionally pop up at his table wearing the face of Evil-Bitchy-Cheerleader-Taylor, or Nerdy-Band-Geek-Taylor and warble a few lines of the chorus before reverting to her blue skin and making a break for it.

At one point, Hank had shuffled up to his desk to offer a quiet but earnest, “You know, you looked good in the tux at the end of the video.”

Alex had fixed him with a stare, and asked, “Et tu, brute?”

*

Tuesday evening, the week after the Damned Karaoke Night, and Alex was once again stuck at his desk working on his second stack of history essays. The stupidity was never-ending. And really, how many times could one misspell ‘Bolivar Trask’ or ‘Sebastian Shaw’? (One poor, unfortunate soul had spelt ‘Trask’ as ‘Trash’ all throughout his essay. It was probably a good thing no one was around to hear his ugly dying noises.)

He was considering breaking out the alcoholic chocolates Scott had sent him a few days ago when a paper ball flew over the divider and hit him on the head.

He had barely had time to think ‘what the fuck?’ before a second one followed its brethren’s flight path.

Alex stared at the two crushed up wads of paper for all of ten seconds before standing up to see where they had come from.  

“Took you long enough,” murmured Darwin. He was leaning back against the wall of his own cubicle, an easy smile on his lips, and in his hands –

Oh.

*

One satisfying make-out session later, he pulled back long enough just to ask, “Seriously?”

“Well,” mused Darwin, “you weren’t picking up on my hints, so I figured it was worth a shot.”

Alex laughed and thoroughly resumed kissing his new boyfriend. Maybe that video wasn’t so bad after all.

**Author's Note:**

> Yes, that is my shitty handwriting and the asymmetrical smiley face.


End file.
